Patience a Fading Virtue

Complicating our political life

Donald Trump’s otherwise foolish plan to re-industrialize America is doomed because it is based on the same logic he used to oust the Democrats from the White House– that voters would wait patiently for a problem to be solved, perhaps even accept a bit of pain in the interim, to achieve a goal that promised to leave them better off.

Trump won by bashing the Democrats for not immediately bringing inflation down and before they could see the results of the Birden public works and climate change policies.

But reviving domestic manufacturing, if it can be achieved at all, will take even longer and impose greater inconvenience than the push for electric autos. That’s partly why the voters will inevitably turn against him and his cronies.

Trump the candidate understood the appeal of promising fast painless relief, witness his commitments to quickly bring peace to Ukraine and Gaza, while freeing the Israeli hostages.

But Trump the President predictably cannot deliver and hasn’t come to grips with the reality that achieving the impossible dream always takes a bit longer than anticipated.

Viewed from this perspective, Trump’s problem is our problem. As Ezra Klein documents in Abundance, it takes government longer than it used to to get anything done while the internet age is convincing people to demand and expect immediate relief. One can argue that the response to Covid is an exception to this rule, but only if you deny that today’s construct that it was another failure by a bumbling elite that doesn’t deserve to lead – a faint echo of the argument that the other side actually won the war on poverty.

Americans, never patient, have a declining attention span and increasingly demand fast relief to any problem.

That’s an institutional problem that transcends the ephemeral hysteria fed by today’s White House – how to get people to tolerate the lag between the cost of public investments and the dividends they pay.

It isn’t a new problem. A conservative friend continues to argue that the US could have ultimately prevailed in Vietnam and he may be right, but we appropriately weren’t willing to pay any price. That’s a chronic problem for democracies that explains why our government has less enthusiasm for staying the course in Ukraine than the Russians seem to have.

On a personal level, a substantial number of Americans, led by recent immigrants, appear still willing to accept the pain today for gain tomorrow equation, perhaps because they perceive that they have greater personal control over the outcome.

But the need for collective patience and possible sacrifice to achieve broad goals has become an increasingly difficult sell. Trump didn’t introduce that problem and it won’t solve itself when he leaves the stage.